It’s O.K., Liberal Parents, You Can Freak Out About Porn

THE draft of the 2016 Republican platform released last week takes such conservative stands on sexual issues it begs to be made fun of. Particularly easy to lampoon is a plank calling pornography a “public-health crisis that is destroying the life of millions.”

How, critics ask, can Republicans say they’re concerned about public health when their statement of principles opposes a ban on military-style rifles and supports coal, which could destroy the lives of millions and their descendants by hastening climate change?

But non-Republicans would be foolish to dismiss pornography as a non-issue. Internet pornography is a real problem for the 66 million American parents with children under 18. Parents don’t have to believe that such material is a direct cause of sexual violence to be driven a little crazy by it. It’s bad enough that it’s giving our sons and daughters some very creepy ideas about how they’re supposed to look and act.

It’s easy to spot parents suffering from pornography-based anxiety. They obsess over whether the seventh-grader supposedly writing an essay is actually watching a free gangbang video on PornHub. They experience low self-esteem because they can’t figure out, or even find, a parental-control program that would filter out the gross stuff without restricting their children to just a few approved sites, making it essentially impossible for them to do web searches for their homework. I develop anger-management issues whenever I read an advice column telling me to keep a close watch on my child’s online activity, as if an adult could plausibly hover over a teenager long enough to ensure that he never clicks on 4chan.

I was outraged when I asked the school my 12-year-old was attending to help me porn-proof the laptop we’d been advised to buy for him, and the school said no. As it turns out, that was more or less the only answer it could give. There just isn’t a good way to keep a curious child from ferreting out graphic imagery.

Regulation hasn’t worked. Two bills passed by Congress to restrict minors’ access to pornography over the past two decades were struck down by the Supreme Court because they infringed on adults’ First Amendment rights. In one of those decisions, Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that available filtering software should do the trick. (A third bill, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, requires schools and libraries to install porn filters on their computers; the court deemed it narrow enough to pass muster.)

It was easier to withhold pornography from children when people had to go to a bookstore, peep-show or movie for their voyeuristic experiences, and clerks and ticket takers could turn children away. On the internet — to paraphrase the famous cartoon — no one knows you’re a kid.

The global nature of the internet vastly complicates censorship. One suggestion is that pornographers use identifying markers like a special domain name, .xxx, to make their products easier to filter. But even if American producers complied, foreign ones might not. Besides, anyone can copy and republish anything, eliminating the markers.

In addition to making pornography hard to contain, the internet is making it weirder and weirder. Intellectual property theft and the flooding of the market by amateur sex tapes has cut into producers’ profits; they can compete with bootleggers and Aunt Fannie and Uncle Bob’s home videos only by coming up with more extreme scenarios.

In an essay last week in the online journal Aeon, the journalist Mark Hay lays out how the industry uses data collection to discover and satisfy the most outré desires. “You can boot up Pornhub, xHamster or any other popular porn tube site that collects videos from around the web, and there’s a decent chance that you’ll see a moving thumbnail of a topless girl in a diaper,” writes Mr. Hay, or “some other fetish you used to have to scour to the dark edges of the net to find.” The fetish that’s trending right now, Mr. Hay told me when I called him, is necrophilia — “artificial snuff films.”

I’m not against the proliferation of internet sexualities (nor is Mr. Hay — he wanted to be very clear about that). I just don’t want my preteens watching actors having sex with corpses, even fake corpses, before they’ve begun to date.

“It’s a really hard problem,” says Clay Shirky, an associate arts professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the author of eloquent defenses of social media. Mr. Shirky thinks it’s futile for now to try to control what his children do on the web. He serves as “IT support” for his family, including his 12-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, so he sees their phones and computers, and is pretty sure he doesn’t “have anything to worry about.” He says that’s just lucky, and “when luck is your only back-up strategy, it’s really troubling.” Mr. Shirky believes that it’s possible to come up with a constitutional way to curtail children’s access to pornography; there just hasn’t been the political will to work on the problem.

Most other experts, however, say that there is no solution that wouldn’t backfire or flunk the free-speech test. The best parents can do is teach children to put disturbing material in context. “The key to parenting children around pornography is not to start an arms race with them by trying to block their access,” Danah Boyd, the author of “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens,” wrote in an email. “It’s about equipping them with the critical sensibilities to interrogate the kinds of sexualized content that is presented to them regularly,” whether by “Game of Thrones” or pornography aggregators.

Contextualizing is a good idea, but we have to do more, because Justice Kennedy was wrong. Filtering software is not up to the job. Left-leaning parents shy away from a cause they identify with right-wing culture warriors, but I challenge any parent to affirm that it’s O.K. for her kids to become digital porn consumers at 11, the average age of a child’s first encounter.

My generation made fun of Tipper Gore in the 1980s, when she urged music companies to label record covers when the lyrics were obscene. I apologize to Mrs. Gore. She wasn’t stopping anyone from making music. She was trying to come up with a good-enough filter.

The songs Mrs. Gore objected to seem innocent compared with today’s raunchy, shall we say pornified, playlist. As the pornography industry explores the darkest reaches of the human psyche in search of profits, liberals may want to rethink the assumption that only archconservatives would try to stop children from going there, too.

Judith Shulevitz (@JudithShulevitz) is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time” and a contributing opinion writer.